The invention relates to the field of communication, and more specifically, to a cellular communication system.
A communication system may employee down link adaptive modulation and coding through a feedback system. An adaptive modulation and coding level of a down link translates as one ordinary skilled in the art know into selection of a data rate of the down link communication. In such a system, a mobile station informs the base station regarding a desired data rate, and the base station complies to the request. When the criteria for selecting a data rate at the mobile station are satisfied, the mobile station determines its desired level of down link communication data rate. This is known as mobile controlled data rate adaptation.
A drawback of a mobile controlled rate adaptation is that the communication system may not achieve high system capacity under time varying loading conditions. The mobile station may not be able to reliably estimate the interference level at proper time to effectuate high usage of the communication system capacity. When selecting the data rate, the mobile is unsure which possible interfering base stations were transmitting idle time slots during the interference measurement, and is unsure which interfering base stations will be idle during the next scheduled transmission from the base station in communication.
Therefore, there is need for a communication system method and apparatus that maximizes the usage of the communication system capacity when a mobile station makes an initial data rate request for a down link transmission from a base station.